Exit 8
Adulthood is often compared to a treadmill for the way the daily grind of responsibilities and obligations manufactures the illusion of forward progress, keeping us running after goals that remain out of reach until we collapse in the same place we started.Â
But what if life is actually more like an inescapable underground station, where every corridor looks identical and the walls occasionally drip blood and produce hallucinations of crying babies and mutated rats? Thatâs where director Genki Kawamura takes us with his video-game adaptation. Same difference, maybe, but a much more useable concept for a horror movie.Â
A sparse, small-scale mindbender, Exit 8 is based on the viral video game of the same name and, for the first few minutes, plays like it. An unnamed young man (Japanese pop star Kazunari Ninomiya) rides a cramped subway train to his temp job in Tokyo. As he disembarks, he receives a phone call from his ex-girlfriend. Sheâs pregnant. In his disorientation at the news, it takes him a moment to realise heâs walking in circles â down the same white-tiled hallway, past the same robotic NPC carrying a briefcase.Â
All that tablesetting is presented in a single, unbroken POV shot; once the protagonist recognises that something is amiss, the perspective changes, and thatâs when the game, for him, truly begins. A helpful placard explains the rules: âIf you find an anomaly, turn back immediately. If you do not find any anomalies, do not turn back.â
The goal, of course, is